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Last year, when Edmonton started the season with a 9-3-2 record, the question was “Are The Oilers For Real?”

If the Oilers had defeated the Colorado Avalanche Saturday and put five points in the standings in three games on the road in a span of 87 hours to go 5-2-1 out of the gate, it would have been back.

Instead the Oilers are 4-3-1 and coming home to play the back-to-back President’s Trophy champion Vancouver Canucks Monday with the world’s greatest back-up goalie, Roberto Luongo. They could be a .500 club in short order. And .500 teams don’t make the playoffs in 82-game schedules or 48-game schedules.

While the entire hockey world believes the Oilers are on their way to the top, the question is whether the six-years of missing the playoffs will come to an end.

That said, the timing is right to make the case that the 4-3-1 Oilers are for real.

Better hockey team

They’re a better hockey team right now — at the one-sixth mark of this lockout-shortened season — than they were last year at the one-sixth mark over 82 games.

Last year Nikolai Khabibulin’s goals against average was a league-leading 0.98 at this approximate point of the season. His save percentage, at .963, was .001 off the league lead.

But next to nobody believed that was going to last for long. And it didn’t.

This year Devan Dubnyk isn’t playing like he’s living lucky. Colorado won 3-1 yesterday but Dubnyk had no chance on either of the first two goals and was on the bench for an extra attacker for the third.

Despite giving up six goals in the first period as this team with eight players under the age of 23 got the heebie jeebies with the “Here Come The Oilers” hype and excitement of the home opener against San Jose, look at Dubnyk’s numbers for the first sixth of the season.

He has a .925 save percentage and a 2.53 goals against average. Saturday, in losing, he stopped 37 of 39. He went four games this week without giving up a first period goal in any of them.

Last year Ryan Smyth’s get-out-of-L.A. numbers included six goals and 11 points. Having run out of gas in his final 25 games the year before in L.A., nobody was holding their breath on that continuing either.

Last year the Oilers played eight of their first 11 games at home. This year they’ve played five of their first eight on the road.

Seven of their next nine are at home, nicely spaced two and three days apart other than the back-to-backs next weekend in Detroit and Columbus.

Did well enough

Ralph Krueger’s team definitely did well enough in the first sixth of the schedule. But they have to do better than 4-3-1 in the second sixth if they’re to put themselves in position to go into the nine-game Brier road trip with growing confidence and maybe even some swagger.

The point is that they should carry some confidence forward off what they’ve accomplished so far. There’s an abundance of evidence.

Killing all six penalties against the Avs, they’re still taking too many trips to the sin bin but the Oilers have a kill percentage of 88.5. The penalty killing went from 26th to 29th to 14th in the last three years and currently sits fifth.

The Oilers also sit fifth in the league’s power-play charts. Edmonton went from 30th, 30th and 27th to third on the power play last year.

It took 273 minutes and 24 seconds for Oilers to get their first lead of season Monday against the Avs in Edmonton. It took 58 seconds this game for Yakupov to get his fifth goal of the season to move into a tie for the rookie goal scoring lead. And it was five-on-five!

It didn’t change Edmonton’s 28th place ranking five-on-five, but it showed the flamboyant first overall pick in the draft is capable of contributing beyond the power play.

After being 30th, 29th and 22nd in the previous three seasons five-on-five, the top two lines are at least creating the chances to believe they can climb that chart.

Same with the faceoff stats. The Oilers were 30th, 30th and 27th in the last three years. They sat 24th after the game Saturday but Ryan Nugent-Hopkins has gone from 37.5% last year to 43.6% and remember, he’s still 19.

Two players alone have already proven they’re making the Oilers better — the two NHL-ready rookies.

Yakupov has six points. Justin Schultz has five and is the team leader in ice time at 22:24 and took his first penalty in 37 games dating back to October in Oklahoma City.

The Oilers are getting absolutely no secondary scoring (Lennart Petrell has the only goals not produced by the top two lines or on the power play), and they’re going to have to address that soon.

But there are more positives than negatives. And the difference this year having played one sixth of the schedule from last year is that the positives are real.

JONES: Edmonton Oilers have the pieces in place

Last year, when Edmonton started the season with a 9-3-2 record, the question was “Are The Oilers For Real?”

If the Oilers had defeated the Colorado Avalanche Saturday and put five points in the standings in three games on the road in a span of 87 hours to go 5-2-1 out of the gate, it would have been back.

Instead the Oilers are 4-3-1 and coming home to play the back-to-back President’s Trophy champion Vancouver Canucks Monday with the world’s greatest back-up goalie, Roberto Luongo. They could be a .500 club in short order. And .500 teams don’t make the playoffs in 82-game schedules or 48-game schedules.

While the entire hockey world believes the Oilers are on their way to the top, the question is whether the six-years of missing the playoffs will come to an end.

That said, the timing is right to make the case that the 4-3-1 Oilers are for real.